Page 23 - MLD Book

when he wasn’t sitting in the chair or minimally chasing dirt, he was concocting things to either make us laugh or more appropriately, be irritated or horrified. I took Tuesdays off in 1986, which mean that Julian would hand out the food bags in the morning hours. At that time, the Help Office handled all the referrals and paperwork, so all he had to do was hand the bag to the client and get the pink slip to verify. One Tuesday, there were more clients than bags that I had prepared, so he had to do some. That was way too much work so he just shoved everything in sight into one bag. I happened to come in for something that day, and found eleven cans of tuna in ONE bag! I read with amazement in my 1986 food report that our goal for 1987 would be TEN bags a day!!! Nowadays, we give out ten bags an hour!!! The 1986 report shows an average of 125 bags a month. We thought that was a lot back then andlittledidweknow. Alsoduringthisyear,thefamilyservicewasinstitutedat9:30.That meant Melvin would take the first part of Choir rehearsal and I would rush up to the Loft at 10 to accompany the rest of the rehearsal after playing the first part of the service.
Continuing with Julian stories, I remember one early Sunday morning, I came up the steps from the old south parking lot (where the garden now stands) and at the top was a big knife with red all over it. Julian had put catsup all over it to scare me, and it did! Another time, he took a large zucchini from the vegetables we have for food clients and started chasing me with it, poising it between his legs! But the thing that got him fired was his continually waiting outside the women’s restroom staring at the women, and they got nervous about that. IntheinterimbeforeLeroy,averynicecouplesharedjanitorialdutiesandcleanedthe church as it should have been done for the previous eight years.
In this year also we saw the ordination to the priesthood of Paula Jackson and the ascension of Ron Baird as Deacon, a fairly nice man who had a high opinion of his intellect and no knowledge of music. Speaking of deacons, I neglected to mention Stan Gentle, who was actually Fr. Lou ‘s first assistant. He was not an ordained Episcopal deacon, but rather a Baptist minister whose main job was running a fish market! On Lexington Road. In the summer of 1980, I think, Harold Johnson took his own life, and we were called to go to the house, along with both clergy. It was a pretty grisly scene, and Stan, a Baptist tee totaler, ended up drinking three martinis!!! After Ron Baird came Dan Yelton as a real deacon, but his tenure was also not long, as he died, after a few months, of AIDS contracted from boyfriend Bob Zerbe, also a priest, who also had died!!! Somewhere in there was Steve Lose, I think before Paula, and Steve was perfectly agreeable and calm, although he eventually left the priesthood to run the family hardware store! But this epistle isn’t about the parade of Calvary assistants, although that would make a good book as well.
Another subject for a book would be my lifelong experience with funerals, and somewhere in my archives I have written down various experiences I have had over the years playing for funerals. My funeral experiences began as a child when my mother played for Dean Funeral Home in Zanesville and she took me along. I was in love with Mr. McShane, a lovely older gentleman who entertained me royally while she played. After we moved to Louisville, I began playing at Highlands while the girls were very little, and again, they went with me and loved being entertained. It was easy money and quick, and it expanded to three different funeral homes even when the girls were in school and I was full time at Calvary: they were Neurath on Market, Schoppenhorst on lower Market, and Highlands, in the east end of town. The Neurath one is now a restaurant, painted a garish yellow. I hope the sink that they used to drain the blood from the corpses is not used for washing dishes now! I never have eaten there! I was still doing as many as three funerals a week in 1986, all on electronic devices. My EUB gospel hymn memories that I usually kept hidden always